“Are you okay?”
“Never better,” Io lied, her voice rough.
“Swell.”
She braced her hands against the wall and ordered her knees to stop buckling.
“Did you catch any of that tiff?” Jack asked, turning away from her. His voice was calm, but Io felt what their proximity had done to his body. He was not as unaffected as he sounded.
“No.” Io’s voice was nowhere near as calm as Jack’s. She still sounded husky enough to be a torch singer, and her breath tended to catch midsentence. “What were they complaining about?”
“There is some other, more important garden back the way they came. One was feeling crabby because none of the fruit was for them. It all goes to Neveling Lutin for ‘the project.’ The other one wanted to steal some, but his buddy was afraid to try it because Lutin’s gargoyles ate the last poacher—feet first.”
“An important gardening project for Neveling Lutin, and gargoyles too,” Io mused, straightening her spine. “That would seem to have our names written on it. I guess we’d better go see it the very first thing.”
“Yes, damn it, we do need to see it,” Jack agreed. “But we had better make it quick. We’ve also got to get into Neveling’s hole tonight and see what he’s up to. His damned aerosols are being used all over town and we still don’t know what’s in them!”
Io nodded. “And I think it is high time that someone got a look at Horroban. That creature is more mysterious than Moriarty.” She couldn’t stop a shiver at the goblin warlord’s name. “Neveling is just a pawn. We need to find the mastermind.”
“Right, that’s on the to-do list, too,” Jack agreed. He blotted his brow. “These fields are damned hot.”
“So, let’s get this over with and then go have a beer,” Io said, credibly faking heroic bravado.
“Yeah. A beer would be good.” Feys didn’t usually drink beer, since alcohol interfered with their magic, but both Io and Jack’s human side found the idea appealing.
Jack set off at a fast pace, and Io forced herself to keep up. Her nerves were sniveling softly about their close call with the goblins, and her body was screeching about again having Jack inside her but not really inside. At least not in the physical way that counted.
She told them both to shut up, but it didn’t seem to help. She was still both terrified and aroused.
The passage seemed to go on forever, a glowing green tunnel that might lead all the way to Hell. Jack knew that with the constant gloom and white noise, a sort of sensory deprivation could start to set in. The brain, bored with nothing to look at or listen to, started inventing things to entertain itself. Small hallucinations could quickly turn into big bogeys. The problem was, of course, that sometimes the bogeys weren’t figments of the imagination, so you couldn’t just go on your way ignoring them.
He wanted to explain this to Io, so she would be prepared if her brain started freaking, but he also needed to keep his ears peeled for light-footed goblins. They might not have time to share the invisibility spell again, and he needed to be prepared to clobber anything that got close enough to endanger them. He didn’t want to leave suspicious corpses lying about as calling cards, but he would if there were no other choice.
Io would probably resent his protectiveness. She would point out that she had his gun with her. But Jack was not certain that his little fey would actually use it. He had found his visit to her treetop house very instructive. The place was a lot like Io—open to the sky, full of life, and well-hidden from casual passersby. On her shelves, she had a number of books on animal first aid and herbal lore, and a collection of various bird and animal foods stored in glass canisters for refilling the feeders hanging in the tree.
And he’d already seen to what lengths her compassion for the junkies would lead her. This was a woman who respected life. Given that love of all things living, it was ridiculous to have her functioning as a soldier in a situation where she might have to kill. What the hell had Xanthe been thinking?
Well, both Io and he knew what Xanthe was thinking about—and it wasn’t Io’s welfare.
Of course, to be fair to Xanthe, the other thing that Io Cyphre had in abundance was stubbornness, and apparently a decade of revenge mapped out in her mind. Things like the murder of a parent needed some form of closure, Jack supposed. Chances were that if she knew of something afoot in Goblin Town, Io would have found some way to be here, no matter what Xanthe said.
No, the present situation was not a happy one, but Jack still saw that there was a potential silver lining. He was not usually big on philosophical consideration, but any moron could see that it would be helpful for his future to build a relationship founded on life-and-death sort of trust. He could build just such a relationship while helping Io take care of a lot of old personal business.
And Io was definitely warming up to him. She hadn’t fought at all when he pulled the invisibility spell over both of them. She could have pulled the steel-fist spell out of him, and knocked him and both goblins into next week if she’d wanted, but she hadn’t done anything except press herself against him as if she were trying to crawl inside his body.
It had been a hard invitation to decline. His body still wasn’t happy at being told to get back to business, but it would just have to endure. Far more important was that his wary fey continue to have faith in him. And that they stay alive, of course.
“I think we’ve found ‘the project,’ ” Jack said softly, shaking off his musings.
The tunnel opened up into another cave, this one hung with lamps to provide lighting other than the walls’ luminescence. Plants were being grown in raised tubs in an obvious if unusual form of hydroponics.
Each plant was loaded with what appeared to be enormous fist-sized strawberries that looked deliciously succulent.
“You’d never know they were grown underground. Except for their size, they could pass for normal fruit,” he murmured.
“Only more irresistible. They’re like the apples the wicked queen fed Snow White: perfect, deadly, the perfect marriage of high tech and black magic.”
“And they’re all organically grown in eco-friendly ways. Nothing but the finest evil fruit for our every dining need. What would you pay for one of these beauties?”
They stepped closer. The sound of trickling fluid feeding the goblin-fruit plants’ basins was too thick to be relaxing. Ears knew that they weren’t listening to water rippling down a stream.
“Gotta love hydroponics. No pest-control problems,” Jack commented, looking at the fruit plants’ enormous leaves. “I bet some salt in the water would screw things up though.”
“Or an imported dose of red stele infection—or spider mites.” When Jack stared at her, Io added, “I like gardening. I have my own strawberry patch.”
“How fast could either of those things kill off a plant?” he asked curiously. “Could we use them as subtle sabotage of this crop?”
Io looked at the huge foliage and the nearly ripe fruit around her, then shook her head.
“They’re not fast enough.”
“Okay, so much for subtlety.” Jack took out his bandanna and plucked off two of the lower pieces of fruit. Again, each tiny stem drooled red sap. “We have samples. Enough with our goblins’ farming endeavors. We need to go see the production end of things. They have to be doing something with all this fruit, and I am sure it isn’t going to the Saturday farmers market. Damnation! We will never make it to Neveling’s factory at this rate.”
“Wait. Not the farmers market, but…” Io thought hard for a moment, obviously trying to fit a couple of odd facts together in her mind. Jack waited patiently. Her intuitions were usually sound, if oddly arrived at.
“Jack, they said these were for Neveling.”
“Yes.” He mopped his brow. “And speaking of him…”
“Wait. I need to think.” She laid a hand on his arm, probably making sure she had his attention—as if he had stopped thinking of her for a moment since sharing the invisibilit
y spell.
“We’ve been looking at three things and thinking they were mostly unrelated,” she continued. “But maybe we don’t have three problems. Maybe we have just one.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’ve been worried about what Glashtin is pumping through The Madhouse’s ventilation system, right? We have also been wondering what Neveling is up to in his factory with this new perfume he’s making from goblin musk—or at least Ferris is wondering that.”
“Don’t forget Horroban.”
Io shook her head. “I haven’t. Our éminence gris is up to his ears in this stuff, one way or another. But to me he seems a sort of a side issue. In the long term he’s important, but he’s not something we have to deal with right now.”
Jack shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. But go on. What is the third thing?”
“The last thing we’ve seen and wondered about is the increase in goblin-fruit junkies—and how sick they are. I keep asking myself—Why would so many new people be eating the goblin’s poisonous fruit when they are educated against it? People aren’t that dumb. And if they did start using, intending it to only be recreational; when they first saw that they were really getting sick, surely they’d go for help—try rehab or something.” She turned to Jack, her eyes wide and worried. “But they don’t. You want to bet it’s probably because this new super-fruit the goblins are growing is being delivered in innovative and experimental ways and people don’t even know they are being addicted? I mean, the goblins would want to test it, right? See how it is most effectively delivered?”
“Maybe.” Jack began to put it together on his own. “You think Glashtin is testing Lutin’s new perfume in the ventilation system of his club. And the perfume is made not just from goblin musk and some man-made hallucinogenics, but from goblin fruit—this super goblin fruit—as well. And all at Horroban’s instigation.”
“Well, think about it. What if they could make a fruit so potent that you didn’t need to ingest it to become addicted? All you had to do was get a few parts per million on the skin, or inhale it. Don’t forget what Ferris said: Neveling’s basic perfume is a perfect biological delivery agent. It has something to do with its molecules being small enough to pass through human skin.”
Jack shook his head. “Nobody would want strawberry juice cologne, though—even from a regular cosmetic company.”
“No, not because it’s strawberry juice. But what would be oh so fashionably chic to wear is the firstever goblin musk perfume.”
“It would?”
“If the media told people so, often enough and loudly enough. ‘Take a Walk on the Wild Side—L’Air de Lutin. Coming Soon.’ And ‘Bad Girls Do—Will You?’ You’ve seen the ads, Jack. I have.”
He nodded. The ads were everywhere, even on the sides of buses.
“Then, when all fashion magazines had hyped your product, and you had the masses clamoring for a whiff, what if you did a free mass-mailing of your L’Air de Lutin perfume all over the country? Or the world? I mean, money is no object if you have a powerful backer. Or a lot of them…Look at whom the goblins have been replacing. It isn’t priests and paupers.”
Jack gave a low whistle. “When you go paranoid, you go all the way.”
“Is it paranoia?” Io asked urgently. “Think what would happen; then tell me I’m wrong to be worried that practically every woman in the U.S. is about to become addicted to goblin fruit essence.”
“What would happen is that you’d have a huge increase in the junkie population worldwide. Just like we’ve had here,” he admitted, not liking her theory but seeing it had diabolical merit.
“With a one hundred percent guaranteed return business for your product.”
“For three or four months, until your customers all died,” Jack pointed out.
“Maybe not. Maybe the aerosol version isn’t as deadly as the pure fruit. Maybe you just need more perfume at, say, five hundred dollars an ounce. It would be more expensive than opium or cocaine—or any drug that has ever been on the market. It would knock out every other perfume manufacturer, too. No one would go around wearing other scents. Lutin would have the market cornered. Do you know how much money we are talking about? The government types might be largely spared, being men, but they all have families—mothers, wives, daughters. Everyone would be affected in some—”
Jack shook his head. “I’ve been thinking about that, and we can’t even assume they’d be initially missed because they’re men. There could be secondary addiction through touch or breathing of perfume sprayed in the air. And anyone the goblins couldn’t get with perfume could be addicted through sabotaging the ventilation systems where they worked.”
Io swallowed. “They’d become goblin-perfume users too,” she said aloud. “Everyone would become a customer.”
“Now take it a step further,” Jack said. “We can’t count on this being about cornering the perfume market and making lots of money for some goblin consortium.”
“Why?”
“Because of our friend Horroban’s involvement. Look at the things he has already done. He is known for being secretive and wicked beyond all normal greedy goblin behavior. I mean, Horroban could be something more than just an ambitious, unethical capitalist with six limbs. Maybe he is a homicidal megalomaniac who would be quite happy to wipe every last human off the face of the earth.”
Io began to shiver. “Why would he? He could have all the power and wealth he needs here by selling—”
Jack shook his head. “You’ve been listening to the propaganda from the goblin apologists. They’d have us believe that most goblins are harmless little farmers longing to return to the good old days of keeping human hearths clean and looking after our homes in exchange for a fair wage. But that is all just mythological nonsense. They never wanted to just be our housekeepers. Remember the reasons for the goblin purge back in the Twenties? Believe me, the goblins do. They are angry that they missed their chance to be on top, and have been waiting for another. With humans dead or enslaved, and most of the feys gone, there wouldn’t be anything to stop them from finally ruling the world.”
Jack and Io stared at one another across the beautiful, deadly fruit plants, feeling cold all the way to their bones in spite of the cavern’s tropical heat.
“I believe you, Jack. I do. But no one else will ever consider it—not in time,” Io said quietly. “They’ll think we’re nuts, or that I am so bent on revenge for what happened to my mother that I am making stuff up. And if Xanthe is really involved she’ll contradict anything I say.”
“The police will believe me,” Jack said, “but there won’t be much that they can do officially—not without something indisputable to force the governor’s hand. The man in the capitol has his boot on everyone below him’s necks because Horroban has promised to finance his reelection campaign. He won’t piss in the goblins’ soup bowl until the problem is so big it bites him on the ass.”
Io stared hard at Jack. “We’ve got to find the proof. Somewhere. Something they can’t ignore.”
“Yes. I hear you.” Jack looked into Io’s eyes. Then he said quietly, “But it might not be a bad thing to have a back-up plan for taking out this Goblin Town hive. Just in case we can’t get the evidence pulled together in time.”
Io’s eyes got big and began to glow with alarm. She opened her mouth and then shut it again. For a moment, Jack wondered if he had lost her law-abiding heart.
“Take out Goblin Town? The whole underground? By ourselves?” After a moment she swallowed hard and then said, “Well, it never hurts to have a back-up plan.”
Jack exhaled slowly. He hadn’t misjudged her. Her love of life was coming down on the side of humans, and she could understand the need to destroy this place. “Glad you feel that way.”
“You bring the marshmallows. I’ll bring the beer,” Io said in an attempt at gaiety.
Jack laughed softly. Goddess! He loved this little fey! What a team they made. He said, “You bring the beer an
d marshmallows. I think I’ll bring the kerosene and a supercharged fire spell. Or dynamite, if I can find it.”
Io’s tentative smile died. “I’m all out of dynamite and fire spells this week. I guess we had better go shopping.”
“First thing tomorrow morning. Fortunately, I know someone at the dynamite store who can help us out. It sometimes pays to have low friends in high places. And I already have a fire spell.”
“Jack, I’ve been thinking.” Io rubbed her forehead. “Before we do anything final…we haveto try to get Chloe out. I know she’s a junkie, but she’s young. It may be that she can be saved if she gets treatment.”
Jack sighed inwardly. He should have known that Io’s conscience would eventually rear its head.
“We won’t do anything for a while yet,” he assured her, evading the plea. He’d try to help the kid, of course, and anyone else trapped in the underground. But getting Chloe out might not be possible. They couldn’t risk being discovered here before the goblin fields were destroyed. The stakes for the world were too high. Chloe might end up being a casualty of war.
Io knew this too. She could do the math—in fact, she had made the calculations ahead of him. She just wasn’t ready to give up on the girl without a fight. And that worried Jack—in this situation, a tender heart was a liability, undermining a person’s resolve.
“Hey, remember that this plan is for just in case our raging paranoia turns out to be correct. Okay?” Jack asked. “We’ll try everything else first.”
Io looked at him, her expression as sober as any hanging judge’s had ever been. “Okay, Jack. But I have a bad feeling about this.”
“It’s probably dinner.”
“I don’t think so.”
Jack didn’t think so, either. He had the same bad feeling, and it wasn’t confined to his stomach.
“Time to go,” Io whispered.
“Time to go,” Jack agreed.
Chapter Fourteen
Once past the agricultural acreage, the hive became more urban in appearance and a lot less hot. There were more goblins about, too, but more places to hide from them. Io didn’t need telling to stick close to Jack. The closer they got to Lutin’s place, the more the reality of what they were dealing with filled her mind. She had too vivid an imagination, and her nerves demanded Jack’s solid, confident company.
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